Pat Summitt’s Signature: Success and Dignity

It was at once a moment expected and inevitable and yet one with no way to prepare. As Tennessee’s women’s basketball season marched on, it became clear Pat Summitt could not sustain her role as head coach much longer as she battled early onset Alzheimer’s and it became one long goodbye party, but one no one could acknowledge. And when the goodbye was finally uttered on Wednesday, with Summitt abdicating the throne she occupied for 38 years, the reality washed over everyone who is in some degree in her debt. And that would be everyone in the sport.

It was hard not to appreciate how rare that is in sports, particularly with the maelstrom of everything else. Up in Wisconsin, Coach Bo Ryan was showing the ugly side of college sports’ control over its unpaid players, throwing every road block in his power in front of transferring player Jared Uthoff, as Jeff Goodman writes on CBSSports.com. Southern Methodist, meanwhile, was continuing its out-of-this-world crazy courtship of coaching vagabond Larry Brown, Pat Forde writes on Yahoo.com.

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Pat Summitt after Tennessee defeated DePaul in the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament in March.Credit
Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

And if you’re looking for dignity and class, please don’t even pause at the N.H.L. these days. Yes, its three playoff games transpired without any players being hospitalized (after all, Gary Bettman wants us to think positively!! :) ), but the matter of how punitive a suspension the league will hand Phoenix head-hunter Raffi Torres for his brutal hit on Chicago’s MarianHossa still hangs in the air. It sounds good that he’s suspended indefinitely until you realize it’s just because they haven’t announced it yet, having pushed back his hearing until Friday. Yes, Torres will miss at least one game waiting for his hearing, and it won’t be a tough decision to throw a shelf-full of a books at him, but the N.H.L. usually falls on its face in such matters, so it’s best not to presume anything. Dave Shoalts of The Toronto Globe and Mail reminds us that this butchered set of offseason discipline is the product of a shiny new system of justice that produces the same old rusty results.

We found out a few more things Wednesday night in the Rangers-Senators game, namely that the Rangers let an overmatched opponent back in the series with an inexplicable lapse, writes Allan Muir on SI.com. We discovered that Vancouver’s off-the-mat victory over the Kings has probably settled the Canucks’ goaltending question in favor of Cory Schneider once and for all, writes Iain MacIntyre in The Vancouver Sun.

But what we mostly discovered on Wednesday was what we already knew about Pat Summitt, that the end of her reign was near and that the goodbye would be done well.